Neve Bradbury looked set to be one of the key contenders in a strong Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto squad at the Women’s Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race on Saturday but when the team headed to the waterside sign-on in Geelong they were one member short, illness meant the 22-year-old Australian would have to sit this one out.
Bradbury, who came eighth overall at the Tour Down Under and fourth on the Willunga Hill stage, had already sat out the new 1.1 ranked Surf Coast Classic on Wednesday and unfortunately wasn’t quite ready to get back out there.
“She wasn’t 100% well before Wednesday’s race, and so we’d made the decision to not start there,” sports director Beth Duryea told Cyclingnews just before the race started. “Since she’s also not 100% recovered – it’s just like a small sort of cold, basically – we just said, ‘OK, it’s not, it’s not the time of year to be really pushing and forcing’, even though we knew that actually she could do really well in this race, and it would be good for our team plan if she was here.
“But that’s just how it is, and we need to accept and she will recover now she already has another week planned in Australia, at home with the family, and then she will head to Europe, so she’d be back to normal schedule.”
Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto may well be missing a valuable option in Bradbury but they have others, with Chloe Dygert lining up alongside Tiffany Cromwell, Maria Martins, Alice Towers and Maike Van der Duin.
Dygert has already proven her form on multiple occasions through the Australian summer, winning stage 3 of the Santos Tour Down Under and also coming second in the Surf Coast Classic to Ally Wollaston (FDJ-Suez) in the sprint.
After that the two-time time trial world champion will be closely watched in the 142.4km race with expectations high that she’ll launch a late attack though, as her rivals found out in South Australia, she has a turn of speed that can be hard to match even if you know it’s coming.
When asked at the sign-on interview whether a late attack was on the cards, her response was: “that’s a good question, you’ll have to wait and see.”
